Slack is pretty much just IRC with an indexer, a pretty web interface, a mobile interface and a bunch of of cool datafeeds/bots. These things aren't hard to bu

Slack is pretty much just IRC with an indexer, a pretty web interface, a mobile interface and a bunch of of cool datafeeds/bots. These things aren't hard to build, and many people build them internally in companies all the time. Their value proposition isn't the technology, their value proposition is the packaging. It all just works. People actively maintain the interfaces and the GUI. They have ops teams that keep it up. The integrations are maintained and are literally plug and play. You can pretty much just sign up and within an hour its all done for not much money. For these reasons, I have doubts as to whether or not they'd mind, regardless of IP concerns.